


A Reply to the Second and Third Houses of the Earth

by Luzula



Category: Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Agriculture, Gen, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-08 01:38:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14094219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luzula/pseuds/Luzula
Summary: Listen, you people of the Blue Clay, listen, you people of the Serpentine!Listen, you hunters and fishers and gatherers, you who live on the hunting side!You look at the farmer and think: he plows like he owns the land.You look at the shepherd and think: she herds like she owns the flock.





	A Reply to the Second and Third Houses of the Earth

**Author's Note:**

> I'm rereading this for a book club, and someone challenged me to write a reply to "An Exhortation from the Second and Third Houses of the Earth", in the first section of poems. So I did.

Listen, you people of the Blue Clay, listen, you people of the Serpentine!   
Listen, you hunters and fishers and gatherers, you who live on the hunting side!   
You look at the farmer and think: he plows like he owns the land.   
You look at the shepherd and think: she herds like she owns the flock.   
So too may the hunter crow, with mastery over the kill.   
The deer may be hunted to scarcity.   
The berries may all be picked.   
We all may lose the way: us no more than you.   
And take care as well, and come once in a while to the planting side.   
You speak of equal ground, of running by the side of the deer.   
You gather where you may, you hunt and kill, free as cotton seeds on the wind.   
But take care you do not make too much of your independence.   
The corn in the furrow depends on us, so do we depend on it.   
The lambing ewe needs our care, so do we need the lamb's meat to live.   
This is what we know on the planting side: that we are bound to each other, that we are not free.   
You have been a babe in arms, did your parents own you?   
You will be old and infirm and unable to hunt, will you then starve to death?   
Come take your place: tend to the corn and the lambs.   
It is yourself you tend.


End file.
